The college assign effective academic advisors who are supposed to provide educational counseling for students. The academic advisor's primary responsibility is to evaluate the student’s plan of study to ensure it will satisfy the college and university requirements while it meets each student's specific needs. To be effective, the advisor must recognize that each student has different abilities, interests, aspirations, needs, experiences, and problems so that his approach in dealing with students can be different from one to another. To fulfill this requirement, the general advising duties can be stated as follows:
- The academic advisor is expected to deal with students’ academic, career, and personal problems.
- The academic advisor helps his advisee students examine the course offerings in their major and understand their graduation requirements.
- The academic advisor helps his advisee students to select the elective courses offered by the program.
- The academic advisor helps the student explore the career fields within his major, and obtain related career information and survey job opportunities.
- The academic advisor serves as a link between the student and the administration by counseling the student on matters of failure, on the procedures for dropping and adding courses, course scheduling, and academic progress.
- The academic advisor must alert students of any subsequent changes in the curriculum that might be enforced during the course of their studies.